Brave New Jams

The term, as it is commonly used today, references a rich palette of sounds and textures. These groups share a collective penchant for improvisation, a commitment to songcraft and a propensity to cross genre boundaries, drawing from a range of traditions including blues, bluegrass, funk, jazz, rock, psychedelia and even techno. In addition, the jam bands of today are unified by the nimble ears of their receptive listeners.

A unique feature of the jam band scene is fan taping or digital recording of live concerts. While many other styles of music term fan taping as "illegal bootlegging", jam bands often allow their fans to make tapes or recordings of their live shows. Fans trade recordings and collect recordings of different live shows because improvisational jam bands play their songs differently at each performance. By the 2000s, as internet downloading of MP3 music files became common, downloading of jam band songs became an extension of the cassette taping trend. Archived jam band downloads are available at various websites, the most prominent ones being etree and the Live Music Archive, which is part of the Internet Archive.